The Transport Secretary today refused to back Britain’s much-criticised air traffic chief, saying he must provide a report into a technical fault that caused 2,000 flights to be cancelled.
National Air Traffic Services (NATS) chief executive Martin Rolfe was summoned to a meeting with Heidi Alexander on Wednesday as he faces growing calls to resign.
He was given a week to prepare a report on the cause of the failure yesterday and the minister today confirmed it should “be on my desk next Wednesday”.
Mr Rolfe was found responsible for the chaos affecting 330,000 passengers, with an IT glitch disrupting 2,145 flights on Tuesday and Wednesday.
He has received £2.2 million in bonuses and incentives over the past three years, despite two high-profile air traffic control failures in 2023 and 2025.
In a series of television and radio interviews this morning, Ms Alexander repeatedly refused to say whether Mr Rolfe should resign following the chaos of the trip.
Asked whether Mr Rolfe should keep his job, she told BBC Breakfast: “I want to look very carefully at the report that will be on my desk next Wednesday.”
Ms Alexander also said today that she met with Mr Rolfe “within 24 hours of the incident” to request a report within a week and asked Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) chief executive Rob Bishton to carry out an independent review within six months.
She told Times Radio: “I’m particularly interested in the cause of this incident, how the backup systems worked. In 2023, an incident occurred, after which a large audit was carried out.
“A report on this was published earlier this year. This review resulted in 34 recommendations, all of which have been implemented. We need to find out what went wrong here. We need to pay attention to planned IT upgrades.”
Transport Minister Heidi Alexander met with the head of the National Air Traffic Service (NATS) on Wednesday.
NATS chief Martin Rolfe is facing calls to resign after a technical glitch grounded 2,000 flights.
Asked whether “the right person is running NATS”, she added: “I have asked the CEO to prepare a report which should be on my desk next Wednesday.
“I will be watching this very closely. I have also asked the Civil Aviation Authority to carry out independent work. It would be wrong for NATS to grade homework. And that is why we have asked the CAA to conduct an independent investigation.
“I will be watching this very closely. “I’m not going to rush to judgment until I see the work that comes across my desk next week, as well as the slightly longer work that the Civil Aviation Authority will be doing.”
Last July, a “radar-related issue” caused an air traffic control glitch, disrupting thousands of passengers and leading to the cancellation of more than 160 flights.
In August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers were affected when flights were grounded at UK airports due to a technical glitch in NATS while processing a flight plan.
Ms Alexander told MPs on Wednesday she did not believe the problem was “inevitable”, while Downing Street said the government still had confidence in Mr Rolfe.
But among those calling for Mr Rolfe’s resignation was Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary, who said the NATS chief’s position was “untenable”.
Mr O’Leary accused the Government of trying to “protect” Mr Rolfe, adding that it was “beyond comprehension” that he had been asked to conduct the investigation himself.
The Ryanair chief also accused Rolfe of lying about the cause of the outage. He said NATS advised the airline that the glitch was caused by an incorrect flight plan – the same problem that caused a major glitch in 2023.
Mr Rolfe said he believed the latest blackout was caused by “something different” than previous incidents, but Mr O’Leary rejected his explanation.
Passengers are complaining of flight delays at Heathrow Terminal 2… chaos affecting 330,000 passengers, with 2,145 flights affected on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Passengers queued for hours at London Gatwick Airport’s South Terminal on Wednesday.
“NATS informed us that this was another fraudulent flight plan. Today Martin Rolfe denies this,” Mr O’Leary said. “I believe he is lying to save his own skin.”
A NATS investigation into the 2023 outage found that it was caused by a “one in 15 million” event, where the flight plan contained two identically named but different waypoints, putting both the system and its backup into “fail-safe” mode.
Ryanair is suing NATS in the High Court in London for more than £7 million over the airline’s disruption in 2023 and has called on the operator to reinvest profits into staffing and productivity improvements.
easyJet Holidays chief executive Harry Wilson called the week’s events an “absolute pain” but did not support calls for Mr Rolfe to resign.
Speaking at Travel Weekly’s Future of Tourism conference yesterday, he said there was a “much more fundamental question that needs to be answered about investment in infrastructure”.
Tui UK & Ireland managing director Neil Swanson also failed to call for Mr Rolfe’s departure. But he said of NATS: “They should do something about it. This is not about individuals; it’s about making the right investments. They need to take some action.”
Whitehall sources yesterday questioned how long Mr Rolfe could keep his job given his “list of failures”.
One told The Times: “The government has a golden share in NATS and Martin Rolfe has overseen repeated blackouts that seem to wash it off like water off a duck’s back. In no other role could you withstand so many failures and survive.”
Transport Minister Keir Mather said the disruption to passengers “raises really serious questions about emergency planning and resilience planning at our airports”.
NATS apologized to passengers and airlines for the inconvenience, for which Mr Rolfe said he took “full responsibility”.
NATS also said yesterday that an investigation into Tuesday’s incident was “already under way” and would report to the Transport Secretary and the CAA next week.
The air traffic controller added: “We are very aware of the additional pressure this has placed on industry colleagues and thank them for their continued hard work.”
The CAA said passengers were “unlikely to be entitled to compensation for flight delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident” as the outage was likely to be considered the result of “extraordinary circumstances”.
Flight disruption has now subsided as airports including London Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stansted confirmed operations had returned to normal.
Information company Cirium said 54 of 3,028 scheduled flights were canceled or grounded yesterday. Some 47 of the 3,033 scheduled departures were also affected.